Facebook More Than Just A Bible of Faces

The difference between my brother and me is that despite size and age he always looked back while I look straight ahead, and this is the way it always has been.

-Arvid Jansen, the hero of the Norwegian writer Per Petterson’s novel In the Wake

Bohemian Facebookers jumped into bed with The New Yorker, whose librarians dug into the magazine's archive to find some of its best works focusing on memory. Language which tries to capture these memories has a logical job to do—to convey information—and yet it is riddled with irrationality: irregular verbs, random genders, silent vowels, ambiguous homophones ... Facebook Selective Memory: Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering

Ever since Facebook's May 18 public stock offering, the financial press and their investor sources have been working on its obituary. Like the media business, Facebook thrives on advertising, and enormous pressure is on it to make money now that it's public. The company might experiment, for example, with sponsored stories–advertorials by companies (including media)–who use the site in a pay-for-play capacity. And “there's still potential for paid search and other types of payment systems on Facebook,” says Jackson. Media Dragons: Why Facebook might be completely gone in five years

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity ;-)Behind every facebooker whether they are Slavs like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Solzhenitsyn there tends to be an overworked, underappreciated wife. Do they deserve pity? No, they deserve more credit... Speaking of Old Wives' Tales [Stories or Memories that outrage one generation become slothful banality to the next ... Though I wrote the Iron Curtain Gospels of the Cold War Century, I too shall die in the gutter.]

Apple: Oranges are not the only fruit

Great business turns on a little pin.
If anyone had any question what hard core irony is exactly, consider this: Today is the one-year anniversary of the day Steve Jobs stepped down from his job as the charismatic and legendary leader of Apple, as well as the very moment that the company he co-founded has largely won an epic legal battle with Samsung over patent infringement ...

In a quote by Steve Jobs from Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, he famously said:

I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this. (Every bohemian Media Dragon has to read this book twice or else ;-)]

Apple's victory in a San Jose court gives it an upper hand in a global negotiation and being conducted via litigation - Apple got the best of Samsung in the first of their many patent trials to go to a U.S. jury. A nine-person panel came back to the federal courtroom in San Jose, Calif., Friday afternoon, after only three days of deliberation, and announced that the Korean electronics giant had infringed six of the seven patents for Apple mobile devices that were at issue in the trial. The verdict came with a $1.05 billion price tag, less than half of what Apple was looking for, but not too shabby, all the same. New blood at Apple are taking lots of leaves out of the pages of former role models such as Ken Segall who took the capital I from Imrich as they continue to cross the treacherous waters of Iron Curtains surrounding the industrial espionage and the digital Cold War Apple Gets $1 Billion From Samsung—Nothing Changes

I am grateful to many characters who created virtual space for my story of Cold River. The tale of escape across the Iron Curtain continues to flow in the digital currents because Michael Schaefer, Steve Jobs, Rober Scoble and Shel Israel cared to give me oxygen Deep One Degree of Separation Among Bloggers

Media Dragon Exclusive Scoop: As from XXV of VIII of MMXII there is no more question mark whether Apple will compare Oranges with other Sponsors ;-) UK's Orange Prize For Fiction Soon To Become Apple Prize For Fiction!

My daughters, Gabbie and Sasha, the Children of the Velvet Revolution are rather blessed as they have a role model like no other in Julia Gillard who is 27th most powerful woman in the whole world. With two year under her belt as the first female prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard oversees a population of 22 million and a GDP of $926 billion. Julia Gillard (symbolic two sevens) I escaped on 7 of 7 so 2 sevens are a nice touch by the investigative Forbes ;-) And another Aussie Gail Kelly of Westpac fame is at number 60. Almost as powerful as Malchkeon who is numero 1 (ikk) ;-)

CODA It’s with you every moment of every day. It reminds you of little things that you sometimes forget, like calling friends on their birthdays and picking up the dry cleaning. It sleeps by your side, resting when you rest and working when you work. It even talks back once in a while. Ako Dobre poznas Tvoj ifone? But how well do you really know your iPhone?

Private equity firms claim they help create jobs and improve businesses, but that is not the whole truth How To Succeed in Business Without Adding Value

The Suburb of Surprise

---

On balance, policymakers enjoy possessing and using power. They tend to be decisive and confident. They are also fundamentally comfortable with themselves, and they are not particularly self-critical or willing to accept criticisms. Analysts tend to distrust power and those who enjoy exercising it. They are usually more comfortable with criticism, especially in giving it. Basically, they have questioning personalities.
- Period of the Velvet Revolution when wisdom ruled L. Keith Gardiner, "Dealing with Intelligence-Policy Disconnects,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 33, No 2, Summer 1989

We have replaced the absolute truths of God’s word (the Ten Commandments) with our own relativism (the ten suggestions). Life is a constant battle against this natural law of decay. We fight to protect our marriages from the numbing effects of living in the grind of routine. We are constantly introducing new programs and agendas into our churches and institutions to stir new life. Aging is like a slow descent into a miry quicksand. We diet, we get surgeries, we frantically exercise to fight off this universal enemy. We fight on valiantly even though no one ever wins this battle. The life of America parallels the life of any person. It arrived as an infant. It struggled through its teen-age years. It gloried in the strength of its youth and prime. It then feels the atrophy of age and it will eventually find its rest under a tombstone in a graveyard of empires

Enough with America’s tread-so-carefully literary culture, says Dwight Garner. Criticism isn't for uplift. It’s for straight talk, a little humor, and above all, an argument A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical

A “writers’ writer” is more marketable dead than alive... The Suburb of Surprise

“Modern classic” is a fuzzy term. Does it mean anything at all? At least this: A “writers’ writer” is... more marketable dead than alive （Steve Jobs）

It begins with an adjectival spotter’s guide (“Contemporary . . . Provocative . . . Outrageous . . . Prophetic . . . Ground-breaking”, etc) before moving on to some diffidently expressed first principles. There is talk of such items possibly leading to “great movies”, of the breaking down of “barriers”, whether social, sexual, or, in the case of Ulysses, the “boundaries of language itself”, even of something described as “pure classic escapism”. All this is both oddly dispiriting and, in its multi-angle framing, curiously indiscriminate: mysterious and elusive the quarry may be, but it can always be brought down, you infer, provided enough buckshot is stuffed into the cartridge case. It is also something of a red herring. At any rate Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me, elevated to Penguin Modern Classic status in 2009, belonged to none of these categories. It was simply a sprawling, sub-Priestley best-seller from the 1940s, put there on a sponsor’s whim.

• What makes a modern classic?; Word counts or Australian spell Czechers are actually pretty minor problems Fairfax's dark cloud [ Mirko Zorz, Help Net Security, 8 Aug 2012. This year's novelty is actually scammers using their own fake shortened URL services, has grown from the unrelated activities of a few into an industry in its own right. The Industrialization of Fraud Demands a Dynamic Intelligence-Driven Response ]

• · The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind Magicians; A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything — from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics — back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source

• · · The ’Ndrangheta mafia is extending its reach into the north and beyond. Can Europe come up with a response? Mafia Book Reviews of note ; Culture thrives on conflict. Warfare, terror, and bloodshed nurtured the Renaissance in Italy. Peace and democracy in Switzerland gave rise to... what, exactly? A Point of View: Are tyrants good for art？；Three young women who staged an anti-Putin stunt in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral, and whose jailing became a cause célèbre championed by artists around the world, were convicted of hooliganism on Friday and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. We are happy because we brought the revolution closer! Pussy Riot protest pits church against state

• · · · Witold Gombrowicz settled in Argentina, far from the Polish intelligentsia. He loved catastrophe and lived in penury. He wanted to maroon himself Daily Disaffirmation; What would you do with more leisure time? Explore the mysteries of space and time? Or brawl, steal, and drink? Working 9 to 12

• · · · · The tools of hard science – statistics, data sets – have migrated to the humanities. Want to study social networks in Beowulf? You’re not alone. But what’s the point?. Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one ; Robert Hughes had an aversion to pretense and a knack for the withering putdown. He tried to save art from the art world Robert Hughes: A Fierce Critic and Powerful Voice Now Silenced ； Steve Jobs is a paragon of entrepreneurial intensity, a role model. Or is his a cautionary tale, of an abusive boss with a broken family。 Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him is still a best seller. The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

• · · · · · Public Service Departments and Agencies should spend more time and money training their staff in the use of social media, according to former Gov 2 strategist Craig Thomler Call for PS to call up social media; State Conference ENGAGE. COLLABORATE. INNOVATE. Getting serious on customer service David Leslie, Australian Taxation Office； Sandi Logan, Department of Immigration & Citizenship

Because of Prague of 1968, of Aga's Grave of 1975, of Charter of 77

So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science or [Cold Rivers]. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn't what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.
- from "Everything is Fiction" by Keith Ridgway

Because autumn in Praha was so tempting and because the brothers missed their sisters and because the dream was still alive and I wanted to share some of the Bohemian vistas our fifth wedding anniversary will be ingrained in our memories ...

Late at night on August 20, 1968, they struck like lightning, initiating a massive invasion of their wayward ally. By the morning of the 21st Czechoslovakia was inundated with tanks and troops from East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and the U.S.S.R. Within a week there were over a half million Warsaw Pact troops in the country. In Prague alone 500 tanks controlled strategic locations... False Autumn of 1968

How to live, and how to die. Period. That’s all I’m trying to do, all day long.

Leading with a Story

---

Will Australia find the courage to insist that the human rights of vulnerable people should override the potentially bullying power of large governments. Brave and principled Ecuador: protection of an Australian citizen

When newspaper editors lead with a story, they always use the strongest one they've got - and with good reason too. You're more likely to pick up a newspaper if it has an attention grabbing headline. The same goes for successful business leaders - those that can tell a great story and can connect with their audience will have more success in making a difference and getting heard. The best leaders share stories that people want to be a part of. Leading with a story

The best leaders have worked on the floor first Avoid the Mind-Bugs That Cause Smart People to Make Bad Decision

Rolf Jensen said that the heroes of the 21st century would be storytellers

According to Larry J. Bloom, author of The Cure for Corporate Stupidity. Just like software has bugs, we have bugs in how we think and make decisions. These mind-bugs can cause a lot of corporate stupidity . Avoid the Mind-Bugs That Cause Smart People to Make Bad Decision

People who have excelled in an organisation in a specialist role before rising to the top make better leaders than professional managers. Such 'expert leaders' are the most likely to get results because they have deep knowledge of the jobs their employees are doing. Intelligence, like journalism, involves the acquisition, evaluation, and dissemination of information. In 1949, Sherman Kent, described as the father of US intelligence analysis, said: “Intelligence organizations must also have many of the qualities of those of our greatest metropolitan newspapers. …They watch, report, summarize, and analyze. They have their foreign correspondents and home staff…. They have their responsibilities for completeness and accuracy—with commensurately greater penalties for omission and error. . . They even have the problem of editorial control…. Intelligence organizations (should) put more study upon newspaper organization and borrow those phases of it which they require.”

• The best leaders ; “Simply,” “simple” and “simplicity” — along with like-minded thoughts that include “easy,” “honest” and “clear” — have become marketing buzzwords in response to three related trends: how busy life today seems, the growing complexity of technology and the increasingly complicated economic picture. That has encouraged advertisers to woo consumers with promises to provide solutions that are meant as simple but not simplistic. Paring Down Marketing Messages to a Few Simple Basics [ Story of B at the Randwick Hospital Dancing Dentist Injures Patient, Faces Personal Injury Suit ; 3 articles stiched together from metadata ]

• · DebtRank: Too Central to Fail? Financial Networks, the FED and Systemic Risk DebtRank; Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, sees as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020. Only 10 billion or so are likely to be cellphones and tablet computers. The rest will be machines, talking not to us, but to each other. Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other

• · · New Approaches Needed for Uncovering, Identifying, and Treating Buried Chemical Warfare Materiel Identifying and destroying buried chemical ; 7 Myths About the Economy, Jobs Taxes and Small Business

• · · · You never know who you’ll meet on the internet. Maybe it’s the Craigslist killer, or maybe it’s the author of a book you need to read for your summer school assignment. Author Fights For His Book On The Internet After Slacking Student Pleads For A Quick Summary ; Crowdsourcing has lately been a popular way to gather ideas and information from an array of sources. Now, the Obama administration is taking that avenue to ask citizens to chime in on how to help them overhaul and simplify rules and regulations OMB crowdsources regulatory reform

• · · · · Ages of the youngest and oldest Olympic competitors The generation games ; Turning on the crowdsourcing Spigit Wisdom of the crowd

• · · · · · A hacker demonstrates that code can be hidden inside a new computer to put it forever under remote control, even after upgrades to the hard drive or operating system A Computer Infection that Can Never Be Cured; Australian law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies are facing a potential security nightmare after hackers leaked records held by internet provider AAPT. AAPT hack by Anonymous poses crime data leak fears for AFP and ACC

Living Treasurers

"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy." Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography

John Hatton - is classified national living treasure, Officer of the Order of Australia and former anti-corruption campaigning MP - wants to show the paintings hanging on the walls of his Jervis Bay home. He's proud of the paintings. They're his own work. But there's more than pride in these paintings. Over there on that wall are paintings of aqua-coloured water washing up on brilliant white sandy beaches around the bay - one of the most beautiful bays in the world. desert painting

"Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind--honest work, which you intend getting done." Thomas Carlyle, "On the Choice of Books"

Obsolete Gatekeepers & Iron Tollgates

Looking across Techdirt this week, two trends make themselves apparent time and time again. As artists utilize new ways to succeed, gatekeepers such as book publishers and record labels are becoming increasingly obsolete. The more obsolete these gatekeepers become, the crazier their tactics in trying to deny and prevent it. It is futile to operate a tollgate when the fence it was attached to isn't there any more. Or, to paraphrase Patton Oswalt, there are no gates left to keep when "In my hand right now I'm holding more filmmaking technology than Orson Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane." Of course, this paradigm shift in moving production and distribution into the hands of creators has been obvious for a long time, but several of this week's stories provide delicious examples of the trend. Citizen Imrich

The Campaign Against Real Writers

"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short" - Schopenhauer.

I am sitting at a window overlooking

the mouth cut into the earth

that opens up and reveals

City of exiles.

An emerald river flows from me to the south

and a bohemian river flows back.

Each light a carful of hopes and dreams

and fears.

Memories of better times.

Prayers for better times.

Trapped here with me despite their desperate froth.

Sydneyrella is silver and orange.

Golden sky over silver concrete.

Eucalyptus hills under golden ruby clouds.

Like the life in my chest

the color has surged from my fugitive world.

Destiny made me that rarest of Employee of the Crown (koruna)

From Bottom of the Harbour to taxing airfield of Wickenby ...

The deadly Marco Polo sharing the same sky

"What's happening is that countries are becoming companies. And that's what the British Council is already, just a company cooperating with the Chinese company," Mirsky quotes one leading Chinese poet, Yang Lian, as saying. Real writers

Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history – woven from close research into people and places – that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue. Sometimes, her starting-point is a person, as in Célestine, evoking peasant life in deepest France. Sometimes, she starts from a place – as in her delightful history of the Bankside house which tour guides always say, inaccurately, Wren inhabited while he was designing St Paul's (The House by the Thames). Three Houses, Many Lives What mercy guides me
Down this river

This ribbon cut

Into the snow,.

That flows incessantly and slow

Into the mouth of darkness?

It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians are flattened by safes falling from rooftops mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens — the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

For the Love of Freedom

“Remember, revolutions need fire, like what happened in Tunisia. That fruit vendor set himself on fire, and then everything exploded.” for the love of freedom

And behind the Iron Curtain, in 1979, a son of Poland, Pope John Paul the Second, spoke words that would bring down an empire and bring freedom to millions who lived in bondage. ‘Be not afraid’—those words changed the world...My dad heard those words first hand in the good royal town of Krakow. Like my cousin Andrej Imrich, Vaclav Havel preached and practised these onstructions of being brave ... For forty years you have heard my predecessors tell you in various versions the same thing: that our country is flourishing and that the most wonderful opportunities are opening before us. I assume that you have not chosen me for this office in order for me to lie to you. Our country is not flourishing.

After the communist coup of 1948, the Jan and Jiri Fencl brothers, Praguers aged 19 and 18, pondered on how to secretly cross the Iron Curtain and flee the communist regime, the paper writes. The idea of escaping in a submarine occurred to Jan, who presented it to his brother. In his memoirs he writes he proposed that they go down the Labe river to the British zone in Germany. Yellow Submarine on the bank of Lidka's Labe River

First my auntie Zofka disappeared during WWII and my other auntie Teta Ota escaped communist Czechoslovakia through Sumava

The music from the West was only available on the black market and at horrendously expensive prices. But that only added to its popularity among young people. 'Beat music' had been officially rubber stamped as subversive and the GDR government was afraid that modern rock and pop would stir the already simmering discontent of young people. Rolling Stones did have an impact. Many teenagers behind the Iron Curtain, like the Media Dragon, were fascinated by Jagger, Richards and the rest of the band. They had provided a sense of upbeat get-up-and-go which was unparalleled in post-war Eastern Europe...For many GDR and Czech citizens, it was the desire to listen to music from the West, which added to their wish to live in a free society. "The people got mesmerized by what the Stones did. They read the lyrics and discovered the literary concepts and found philosophical ideals beyond Marx and Engels," Schneidewind says. Did the Stones and other bands from the West contribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall? Schneidewind is sure that they did. "Many claim that art does not lead to changes in society. But I believe it can."
Wuschel, the character in the Sonnenallee novel, had to wait for another few years until he got his copy of Exile on Main Street. He eventually gets the LP - but when being shot at by a border guard near the wall, it is the vinyl under his jacket that saves his life. The bullet breaks the LP but the Stones fan survives Rolling Stones simply threw over board the things that were being preached in schools and official places

Behind the glossy, airbrushed image of the London Olympics is an exhibition - Tracksuit Traitors - which is a reminder of the broken lives and political and psychological torment that tainted the Games movement in the Cold War. He ate two fried chickens, smothered himself in 30 tubes of Vaseline and swam 25 kilometres across the Baltic Sea to freedom. Axel Mitbauer's escape from East Germany is an illustration of what can happen when Olympic ideals are twisted into dark, damaging political ideology masquerading as sport. Tracksuit Traitors

Navratilova, who defected to the United States as a teenager, said she would "never forgive" the Communists for destroying "so many lives Tennis traitors

Wonder what it was like to queue for hours for toilet paper or butter in communist-era Poland? Now you can experience the 'boredom' thanks to a foreign-language version of a hit Polish history-in-a-box board game. Assembly Lies and Lines ...lines

In August 1989, the West German embassy, in the exquisite Baroque Lobkowicz Palace just below Prague Castle, was forced to close down for its day-to-day business. By then hundreds of East Germans were trying to get in, many climbing over the fence into the manicured embassy gardens. The surrounding streets were soon packed with their abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs. In an interview for Radio Prague, the Czech writer, Jáchym Topol later recalled the scenes.Traitors inside Bohemia

16th Street the richest street in the world

Congratulations Gabbie ...
One of the pleasures of parenting is reading your children the young-adult classics that were too complicated for you and are, likewise, too complicated for them...

As we all suspect, thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world. One needs to go where people are serious about acting. The good thing about acting is that it always keeps you on your toes... It's not like any other job where you can go in and do the same thing as yesterday. It beats parliamentary library or committees or any Wickenby of bottom of the habours ... You always were curious about other bohemians That's the essence of your acting. Golden age of Acting- That is the way to feel and to be :-)

When, in September 1967, the BBC Home Service became BBC Radio 4, these are the words the continuity announcer spoke at closedown: 'This is the end of the Home Service for today and for all days. So goodbye Home Service - two of the best words in the British language. We're like a bride on the eve of her wedding, we go on being the same person, we hope, but we'll never again have the same name.'

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated

Poetry Parnassus is a chance for culture to take its rightful place in the building of a community of world artists

Rule No. 9: Have adventures. The Hemingway mode was in ascendancy for decades before it was eclipsed by trendy fabulist “exercises.” The pendulum is swinging back, though, and it’s going to knock these effete eggheads right out of their Aeron chairs. Keep ahead of the curve. Get out and see the world. It’s not going to kill you to butch it up a tad. Book passage on a tramp steamer. Rustle up some dysentery; it’s worth it for the fever dreams alone. Lose a kidney in a knife fight. You’ll be glad you did.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for...
Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.
I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
-Anne Frank

There is a male equivalent to chick lit

---

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come”
Hugo,V 1877, Histoire d'un crime, Part 1

The life of my friend Dmitri Nabokov – a 6 foot 5, stentorian-voiced child of exile – could resemble a James Bond film... Fast cars, fast boats, fast women ; Luckily, there's a male equivalent to chick lit, and conveniently enough, it rhymes! The Top 20: Readers vote for the best in Russian fiction = Cold Spring River

The comparisons between nonfiction and Art don't hold up for me. A nonfiction can be obtained for a few dollars; a Michelangelo cannot be obtained even with millions ...

What makes something ‘cool’?

---

via Tash ( who points; shoots; sometimes she focusws first.) Photojournalist Greg Constantine takes us to the Burma-Bangladesh border, where tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees live in crowded, dirty camps. Between Burma and a Hard Place

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." — Thomas Jefferson (1781)

Which political parties do the Big 4 accountants support? It's a question that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has tackled in a great article here. The short form response

For what I did
And did not do
And do without
In my old age
Rue, not rage
Against that night

We go into,
Sets me straight
On what to do
Before I die—
Sit in the shade,
Look at the sky”

What makes something ‘cool’? A man of pleasure is a man of pains

Today’s world is focused on accountability and measurable results – business leaders, economists and politicians alike scramble for the latest data to inform where they invest time, effort and moneYy.

But what happens when things at the core of human existence can’t easily be measured? This is the problem facing creatives around the world – the arts are routinely underfunded leaving writers, artists and musicians among us on the back foot. The arts are how we express ourselves to one another and future generations. Each piece of writing, artwork and song is a reflection of what life is like at this very moment. Music is the most unique of these as it completely engages our imaginations and lets our emotions run wild

• Lets our emotions run wild; When I was working for Mary Quant in the 1970s, cool was hot pants, shag carpets and waterbeds; now its food trucks, craft beer and pop-up stores. With every generation what’s cool get redefined, but do the characteristics of cool stay fundamentally the same throughout the years? What makes something ‘cool’? [ Thankfully we are not all “idiots” and most of us do have a moral responsibility to pay our taxes on time and full - The politics of point scoring H-INTEL provides a venue for the scholarly discussion of intelligence ; George Megalogenis has reviewed the last 30 years of Australian history through an idiosyncratic lens. History with a soft focus]

• · Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. For W.B. Yeats, the spirit world was anything but false and foolish. “The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write W.B. Yeats, Magus; Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

• · · We would rather be ruined than changed
 We would rather die in our dread
 Than climb the cross of the moment
 And let our illusions die. How did the Aleppo Codex – the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible – end up in an iron case at Hebrew University? Why are 200 pages missing? A High Holy Whodunit; Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre: Ideas migrate among texts, letters morph into essays. Books are unstarted, unfinished, abandoned, aborted. For Future Friends of Walter

• · · · At Defcon, Hackers Show How to Hack Your Android Phone Encryption If you lose your Android phone, your data could find its way into the wrong hands, even if you have encryption turned on; We were buried in an e-book when the subway doors opened at the Bergen Street stop in Brooklyn. In a flash, a pair of hands dove into my date’s lap and ripped away her iPad. Chasing the guy was instinctive. But he had a crew backing him up that I never saw. Instead of winning back the iPad, I found myself lying on the platform bleeding, my jaw split in half. Fighting the iCrime Wave

• · · · · The Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Nick Warner, broke with decades of tradition last week to deliver a public address on the workings of the agency to mark its 60th anniversary. Mr Warner said it was the first time an ASIS DG had spoken on the role and nature of the organisation since it was established in 1952 LX - ASIS opens up; An alleged Canadian spy has compromised Australian intelligence information in an international espionage case that has sent shock waves through Western security agencies Canada spy case rocks ASIO

• · · · · · If you’re not sure what kind of chart would best showcase the data you’re presenting, Chart Chooser makes short work of narrowing it down. Chart chooser ; In this photostory, we cover the most popular and important OSINT tools for a security researcher. Nine OSINT tools every security researcher must have ; Make your own Angry Birds: Homebrew apps have arrived - By itself, the story of a cute, if flatulent, pig pushing a bunch of irate birds off the top spot is nothing unusual. What is odd is that the creator of “ePig Dash”, a conjuror and economics teacher, knew little or nothing about programming. Instead he used GameSalad, a do-it-yourself tool for app-makers Last year Eddie the pig took Chile by storm

Happy Birthday: Best Friends Listen to what you do not say

---

It is better to be in chains with friends, than to be in a garden with strangers. - Slavic Saying

Measuring out your life with friends is a blessing and in July is peppered with friends like Lydka, Steve and Kristof all celebrating their sweet birthdays 。。。

The truth about truth is complicated. After all, lying sometimes desirable. Indeed, small lies can reveal big truths. The Truth About Human Nature

"When I'm with you I feel like I could die and that would be alright, alright."

- Third Eye Blind Intersection of books and life

“Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time”

Malchkeon closed her note with these words: “That's all for now. Thank you so much for keeping alive the flame of conversation.”

There is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry The Best Exotic Life: Solitude & Solidarity

I ndia is a Lovemark for many as it is teeming with the three secrets: Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy. Yesterday I saw one of the great English movies - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. A good old fashioned, upbeat story of optimism in a far distant exotic land...

"Books and friends should be few but good." "Life without a friend is like death without a witness." "May there always be work for your hands to do, may your purse always hold a coin or two. May the sun always shine on your windowpane, may a rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near you, may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you." " A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away."

"Let's make a resolution. I'll drink to that. Let's always stay friends. Friendship is thicker than blood...That depends...Depents on trust. Depends on true devotion. Depends on love. Depends on not denying emotion..." -Rent - Sent in by Cat.

• Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man; Money is an abstraction. Whatever it looks like or whatever it’s backed by, what matters is that people believe in it A Brief History of Koruny [So only now does everything seem to be for sale? In medieval churches, aisle chapels were as likely to be named for bankers as for saints. When everything’s for sale ; Promoting democracy might seem like a good idea. It’s not. The world is riven by sectarian conflicts and allegiances. Will we ever learn from history? History Resumes: Sectarianism’s Unlearned Lessons]

• · The more angles and edges in your playbook, the more creativity will sing. As Steve Jobs said, creativity is just connecting things. Mantras; Facts turn out to be fetishes; fetishes turn out to be facts. The philosophical superstar Bruno Latour, post-midlife crisis, introduces the “factish”.. The cult of science

• · · Mickey Mouse and existentialism. Albert Camus was once a 20-something with a degree and no job in sight. Then he joined up with Walt Disney Robert Zaretsky on Albert Camus; Same as it ever was. Philosophy no longer speaks to the way we live. Or so its critics claim. But the discipline has always had its share of theoretical thickets Our Debt to the Greeks

• · · · Pretty much every cultural assumption about women’s breasts is wrong. But then, what men think about them doesn’t really matter. The historical vignettes are droll and judiciously ; Stanford University is “the germplasm for innovation,” the farm system for Silicon Valley. Who can argue with such success?... Get Rich

• · · · · The artist installs apps in Macs at an Apple store for a work called “People Staring at Computers.” Then the Secret Service rings his doorbell and assumes the role of critic When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide; Boycott threats, menacing graffiti, cyberattacks: Behold the radioactive celebrity of the Polish historian Jan T. Gross A Polish Historian's Accounting of the Holocaust Divides His Countrymen

• · · · · · The Right Honourable Edmund Burke was corpulent, petulant, and fond of lewd jokes. He was also eloquent, brilliant, and brave... who was Edmund Burke the man?; For Edvard Munch, art was an act of memory, a revisiting of images and ideas, a blurring of the line between original and copy. “I don’t paint what I see – but what I saw”. Edvard Munch: the ghosts of vampires and victims

Drowning in Memories

---

Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk the greater the faith. -Kierkegaard, That Brother in arms of Orwell

Humanity demands that I stop for a minute … Today is exactly 32 years since I escaped from Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics to Austria. It is not every day one emerges alive when crossing the Iron Curtain. When is death not within ourselves?... Living and dead are the same, and so are awake and alseep, young and old. Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. It is wise to listen, not to me but to the Word, and to confess that all things are one. War and Peace of escapes.

Character is destiny. All is One Most Orwellian of Orwell’s successors

Any subject can reach a state of worship that threatens criticism and free thought. So noted Christopher Hitchens, that most Orwellian of Orwell’s successors.

He is often called Orwell’s heir because of his fervent love for the writer. In the end, Christopher Hitchens was the most important Orwellian thinker since Orwell. Christopher Hitchens, one sees that his persona is oddly like that of Oscar Wilde’s character Lord Henry Wotton from The Picture of Dorian Gray: loved by an assortment of people for assorted reasons, often when they cannot square with him on something else. Like Wotton, Hitchens was popular with individuals, not because they agreed with him, but because they disagreed with him. When faced with the cultivated erudition, wit, conviction, and eloquence such that “Hitch” displayed, peacocking before a podium or a writer’s desk, one couldn’t help but fall like those in Dorian Gray who despised the hedonist Wotton, and yet couldn’t stay away from his conversation. It’s hard to say where Hitchens’ greatest popularity lies, but much Hitch-love comes from his status as the successor to George Orwell. Orwell’s manner, if anything, was the opposite of Hitchens’ strut. But the two are compared because they both criticized the Left from within on matters of international policy, albeit in independent ways. Hitchens broke from the Left over the so-called war on terror, quitting his literary homestead, The Nation, and making particularly derisive comments about his comrades. These actions were viewed as the strongest individual leftist dissent by a writer since Orwell’s infamous break over the Spanish Communists and the Soviet Union. To boot, Hitchens offered strong, vocal admiration for the elder English author and polemicist, and invoked Orwell on matters of principle and ethics regarding his own conservative turn. Indeed, the two are similarly noteworthy for their incorporation of morals into their politics.

For a lot of people, their first love is what they’ll always remember. For me it’s always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don’t let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental … there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn’t be doing one’s job if one didn’t itch to prick…

• - The road up and the road down is one and the same. Yet Everything flows, nothing stands still. Orwell Knew How To Move Rivers and Mountains and most of all Men ; There Is an ‘I’ In Team [We all have our personality quirks that either endear us to others, or drive them to distraction, often simultaneously. But when does a quirk become a liability in the workplace? And how can you minimise the fallout? Managing extreme personalities ; If all men are monsters, how should we raise our boys? The world of book-learning is especially critical of men. When I asked about books on men in one Sydney bookshop the reply was - Oh God, I don't know Try under mental illness or self-help ]

• · Popular legend has it that actors are vain creatures. Some are, some aren't. Authors, though, poor lonely people, are nine tenths vanity; they live their whole lives believing without question all the good things that have ever been written about them - Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking ; An 8-year-old's conflict management toolbox proves that managing conflict is not as sophisticated as you might think. Conflict management: lessons from the second grade

• · · Think local: Google explains how businesses can get a piece of Australia's $189 billion online market Figures published yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show online business in Australia is up 32% on last year with Australian businesses receiving online orders worth $189 billion 8166.0 - Summary of IT Use and Innovation in Australian Business, 2010-11 ; One cannot review a bad book without showing off -Something even more insidious is beginning to occur, as this week's Essential Report suggests. Loss of trust is contagious. We're not just cynical about politicians; we are also losing faith in the institutions that underpin public life Loss of trust spreading beyond Parliament

• · · · Comedy is an essential part of any play. Without light how can we possibly create shadow? It's like a painter rejecting yellow. - Frustrations happen when expectations go unmet, but by changing your perspective, you can transform frustrations into solutions. Here are three ways to fill a glass half empty... Fill a Glass Half Empty; Somewhere in the world, a desperate user cries out for a UX hero. In the city, a lost tourist is looking for his hotel using a poorly designed app. In a nearby apartment, another man abandons his cart before making his first online purchase. Down the hall, his daughter struggles to complete a research paper using disorganized and unusable websites. An epidemic of unproductive web experiences is sweeping the city leaving a trail of disappointment and desperation in its wake. The world needs a hero. It’s time for each of us to rise up and say “I am that hero!”

• · · · · The Brothers Grimm, 18th-century terrorists, savored violence in their art. Toes are chopped off, severed fingers fly through the air. The fairy tales validate our own fears... Fairy of Fears ; The totalitarian virus did not enter the Soviet state with Stalin. It was there when Lenin and Trotsky were still in charge... A Bolshevik’s memoirs

• · · · · · We don’t feel the force of the uncertainties felt by our predecessors The Olympics and Beyond; After many years of debate and resistance the Canadian legal profession is finally accepting that compulsory professional development is a necessity And the Learners Shall Inherit the Earth